CPS 2018: LiveTiles Exec Stresses Collaboration, Security Balance

LiveTiles

Dec 17th 2018

In the current digital era, being competitive requires organizations to be both collaborative and secure, but finding the right balance between freely sharing information inside and outside a business while maintaining security is crucial, according to Daniel Diefendorf, SVP of the Americas at LiveTiles.

“Our view of the world right now is that within the next three four years, every company one way or the other is going to become an AI company,” he said Dec. 5, during an afternoon Software & Collaboration breakout session called “Collaborate with Confidence – How to Create a Secure Digital Workplace” at the annual Content Protection Summit, presented by the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA).

During the presentation, Diefendorf shared customer use cases to illustrate how to support information and content sharing in one’s business while also staying protected.

“We’re sort of all technology companies now one way or the other,” he said. “But AI still is at that point where it hasn’t been fully democratized and there’s still a lot of mystery around that,” he told attendees.

He pointed out that LiveTiles builds intelligent digital experience platforms. “The very first layer of that is always the user experience” and the user interface (UI), he said, adding: “Whether it’s Google’s platforms or Microsoft’s platforms or whatever, they do provide a good layer of security. They’re getting faster with the updates [and] they’re listening to customers more. But there’s still always that gap, particularly when you get off the reservation a little bit in terms of the core platforms that you’ve bought. So, what we try to do, particularly within the Microsoft world, is make sure we’re complementing and accelerating the adoption of that. We do that with a variety of user experience and user interface tools.”

LiveTiles has another product platform that he noted “synchs into that, which is basically intelligent data collection,” which involves “understanding everything about your constituents – whether it’s your employees, your customers, or whatever.” The intelligent data collection provided by the company “feeds your interface and your host systems so that you can have as much information around the people that you serve – either internally or externally,” he noted.

Moving on to the increasingly popular topic of bots, he said: “A lot of you are probably thinking or talking about AI in your own world. And … we’ve basically created what we believe is the world’s first intelligent conversational agent platform where you can create digital personal assistants on demand without any code and have it integrate with” whatever core system a client is using and “have that sort of proliferate.”

But Diefendorf said: “We believe that everything has got to be monitored. Everything’s got to be sort of checked and audited, as well as tracked from a perspective of making sure that you’re getting the most out of your investment. What we try to do is we end up at the intersection between the core platform investments you make and touching your end users. And the reason why that’s important is … we integrate with over 200 enterprise-grade applications because when you have a central landing page and when you’re trying to empower your users …it’s hard for them to sift through all that sort of chaos.

And so what we do is [work to make sure] you guys don’t feel like you’re layering a lot of technology on top of other technology investments you’ve already made.”

Until only recently, he pointed out, “we’ve had basically a heavy reliance on the core platform providers for things like digital rights management and information security.” But he said: “What we are seeing is there have been some gaps, particularly around contextualizing security as it relates to content. And what we mean by that is we’re starting to see this sort of evolution with AI and machine learning starting to take hold inside of an enterprise, understanding how people are using the technology and how to contextualize that.”

The company unveiled a LiveTiles Bots application at Microsoft’s Ignite conference and “we were super excited” about it at the time, he went on to say, noting that it was designed to enable personal digital assistants at companies globally. LiveTiles representatives then started sitting down with companies to talk about the application and one client wanted to have a single-branded online bot that would be used in multiple complex ways including integrating with Google Home, Alexa and Siri, he noted.

At that point, he realized “we’re going off the rails with this, so what we needed to do, as a company, [was] understand … how to sell security and AI,” he said. That’s because “when you start having things like adaptive cards and images and workflows and integrations into a chat bot, they can get very noisy very fast, and if you don’t manage that, you can have information going many different places and you actually don’t know where that’s going in a lot of cases and you don’t know how people are using it,” he explained.

So, LiveTiles “took a pause” at that point and “made sure that we understood what are the security implications of managing that, particularly AI because AI is sort of an outcome [and] if you don’t understand the components of it, then the conversation stops right there,” he said.

What LiveTiles has “done in the meantime is we’ve continued to work with Microsoft, in particular, to make sure that we’re in lockstep with their security modeling, so that we don’t bring another sort of third-party risk into that,” he said.

Just ahead of the event, LiveTiles announced the availability of LiveTiles Bots on Microsoft AppSource, an online cloud marketplace providing tailored line-of-business solutions. Using the power of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS), the solution gives organizations a simple way to deploy virtual AI bot assistants to boost productivity by freeing staff from repetitive tasks, LiveTiles said at the time.

In July, LiveTiles said during an investor presentation that LiveTiles Bots positioned the company at “the forefront” of the “rapidly emerging” AI market.

The AI industry is expected to “grow more than 20-fold,” from $126 billion in 2015 to a whopping $3 trillion in 2024, it said, citing Transparency Market Research. Eighty-one percent of IT leaders are either investing in AI or planning to and, by 2019, 40% of enterprises are expected to be actively using chatbots to facilitate business processes, LiveTiles said, citing other third-party data and projections.